Goals, Strategies, and Tactics

deciding what to do and how to do it

Terminology

• A goal is something you want to accomplish
  • "Make research fairer, more reliable, and more efficient."
• A strategy is a long-term plan to achieve that
  • "Increase institutional and individual adoption of open science"
• A tactic is a specific action that fits into a larger strategic plan
  • "Give researchers credit in performance reviews for creating open-access data sets"
• Over time, people often confuse strategies with goals
  • Open science isn't the goal: fairness, reliability, and efficiency are
• Tactics may conflict with or contradict each other
  • Giving researchers credit for sharing data incentivizes salami slicing and the proliferation of useless data sets

A Simple Conceptual Framework

• [Borrego2014] looked at how to increase adoption of evidence-based teaching strategies in STEM
  • Prescribed (top-down) vs. emergent (bottom-up)
  • Environments and structures (the system) vs. individuals

A Little Philosophy

• Isaiah Berlin defined two concepts of liberty
  • Negative liberty is freedom from, i.e., there's no rule that says you can't do something
  • Positive liberty is freedom to, i.e., you have the means and ability to pursue a goal
• Those with power will often cede negative liberty without supporting positive liberty
• Berlin and others also showed that absolute rights often conflict
  • E.g., freedom of speech vs. freedom from harassment
• Easy to say "find a balance", but much harder to agree on what that balance is
• Reform movements often tie themselves in knots over this
  • Deny the conflict
  • Try to formulate precise rules in advance
• Two kinds of knowledge [Scott1998]
  • Techne is hard-and-fast rules, often derived from first principles
  • Metis "can be acquired only by long practice at similar but rarely identical tasks [and] requires constant adaptation to changing circumstances."
  • Scientists and programmers want techne; organizational change requires metis